Game of Thrones is premiering on a Tuesday? RT @SenRandPaul: pic.twitter.com/6epeNwmIAZ
— Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) April 3, 2015
Politico, needless to say, is very excited…
Sen. Rand Paul gave POLITICO a sneak peek at the slogan he will unveil at his presidential campaign announcement on Tuesday: “Defeat the Washington machine. Unleash the American dream.”…
Problem is, every one of this year’s many GOP candidates needs to tiptoe along the fine line between appeasing The Base during the primaries and not alienating the average low-info voter during the general election. But RandPaul has the extra burden that his personal base — the Paulistas who kept his old man’s flame alight through so many futile campaigns — is skewed at a sharp angle even from the “average” Talibangelical / Robber Baron / Neocon Warmonger primary-voting Republican. The NYTimes, ever mealy-mouthed, dutifully reports that “Ron Paul Is Expected to Play Little Role in Rand Paul’s Campaign“:
… The elder Mr. Paul, who is known for eagerly commenting on the crisis of the moment, has been much quieter lately. Last week, he was declining all interview requests.
Rand Paul probably cannot win the nomination without support from a large chunk of the 2.1 million voters who helped his father post strong showings, though never a win, in early primary states like New Hampshire. And few believe that Senator Paul, an ophthalmologist who had never been elected to anything, could have won a Senate seat in 2010 without such a famous last name…
Ron Paul, who never had much use for mainstream Republican support and never stood much of a chance at winning the nomination, can be unpredictable. He revels in making provocative statements — which could mean trouble for his son on the campaign trail.
“Ron Paul is a bomb waiting to go off,” said Brian Doherty, an author of a book on the elder Mr. Paul and a journalist for Reason, the libertarian publication. “It would be silly to do this dual campaign thing, and I think they know it. Ron is going to say things that Rand is not going to want to stand behind.”…
Heck, Rand Paul has said enough things that Rand is not going to want to stand behind, per the Washington Post:
…[A]s he prepares to make his formal announcement Tuesday, Paul is a candidate who has turned fuzzy, having trimmed his positions and rhetoric so much that it’s unclear what kind of Republican he will present himself as when he takes the stage.
There are at least two areas where Paul has moved more in line with the conservative Republican base, somewhat to the consternation of the purists in the libertarian movement: adopting a more muscular posture on defense and foreign policy, and courting the religious right.
Where he once pledged to sharply cut the Pentagon’s budget, for instance, Paul late last month proposed a $190 billion increase over the next two years — albeit one that would be paid for by cutting foreign aid and other government programs…
Paul also has been trying to find common cause with evangelical Christian voters, who have been skeptical of and even hostile toward the energized libertarian element of the GOP…
Paul’s statements playing down the threat of a nuclear Iran have put him at odds with conservative Republicans in the past. More recently, he angered noninterventionists when he joined 46 other Republican senators in signing a controversial letter, authored by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), telling Iran’s leaders that any nuclear deal would not be binding past the end of the Obama presidency if it were not agreed to by Congress.
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who won the South Carolina Republican primary in 2012, said that the message Paul will send with his event at Patriots Point is unmistakable: “He’s announcing in a place of military strength, and probably will be talking about our need to remain strong.”…
So Rand has ramped up the Christianism just as WalMart and NASCAR are running away from the public hatefulness of Indiana’s Jeebus-fondlers, and embraced Tom Cotton’s paleocon tantrum just as the new framework with Iran gets announced. But he’s got Newt Gingrich’s approval, and we all know how well Mr. Gingrich’s presidential electioneering went!
Right at this moment, pre-announcement, I don’t get the feeling Rand’s campaign is as purely a dogwhistling grift as Tailgunner Ted Cruz’s stands revealed. Paul the Younger, while equally in thrall to a borderline psychotic sire, is nowhere near as IQ-gifted as Cruz, nor has he ever had to hustle as hard as Reince Preibus’s favorite Cuban-Canadian-American. Maybe he thinks he can actually get to the Oval Office through a combination of caucus-packing and self-licensing?
In any case, this should be a genuine sideshow shite-shower…
I want YOUR questions for @RandPaul! Tweet using #Hannity & watch the interview Tuesday at 10p ET. pic.twitter.com/GmXWZwdRID
— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) April 6, 2015
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